Word to the Wise » subscription

Food for thought

laura — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:30:19 +0000

Companies that can’t be bothered to implement good subscription practices will rarely be bothered to send relevant or engaging email.

True or False?

Preferences pages

laura — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:40:59 +0000

As often as I talk about how badly companies send mail, I think it’s always a good idea to highlight when I find companies doing good things.

Today’s example of a company making me happy is Sur la Table. I’ve been on their mailing list for quite a while and do enjoy the offers and information they send. With the advent of the holiday cooking season, though, they’ve massively increased their volume. 21 emails in September, 25 emails in October and 37 emails in the month of November.

This is how you do preference pages

I received two emails today and decided that the ever increasing volume was not a good fit for what I wanted. I decided, somewhat sadly, to go ahead and unsubscribe from their list. Maybe I’d remember to resub after Jan 1, as I actually like their mail.

I clicked “unsub” and was immediately taken to their preference page. And oh boy was I pleased! They offered multiple options for lowering the volume of mail they were sending in a very simple to navigate page.

And, yes, I did actually choose the twice a week option. Because I do like their mail, just not multiple times a day.

Thanks, Sur La Table, for caring enough about engagement and relevancy to let me have some say in the volume of mail you send me.

Choosing Twitter over Email to engage customers

laura — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 23:53:09 +0000

Eric Goldman has an interesting blog post over at hit Technology and Marketing Law blog comparing and contrasting twitter and email. One of the reasons he likes Twitter is that it gives him, the ‘subscriber’ (follower in Twitspeak) control. There’s no chance that the company will sell his data. And, if the company does tweet too much that is uninteresting or irrelevant, the follower can ‘unsubscribe’ (or unfollow) without any fear that the company will override or lose the unsub request.

To my mind, the biggest problem with Twitter for B2C communication is the 140 character limit. On the other hand, it means that companies need to be clear in their language and concise in their tweets. Maybe the limited space is actually a feature not a bug.

List Attrition

laura — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:40:20 +0000

DJ over at Bronto blog has a post up about list churn / list attrition. She quotes a statistic published by Loren from MediaPost (the original post is behind a subscription wall) that a list will lose 30% of their subscribers year over year. This is similar to a statistic that I use, but the context I have seen the published statistic in is slightly different. DJ offers suggestions on how to reduce this churn. All the suggestions are great, but I think that they slightly miss the point. There are multiple processes that can be described as list churn. One is churn DJ addresses, that is people unsubscribe from a mailing list. The other is people abandon their email addresses. Individual mailers have some control over the first type of churn, but almost no control over the second.

I think the study Loren was quoting describes the second phenomenon not the first. In 2002, ReturnPath published a study that showed 31% of people changed email addresses in a single year. Understand, this does not mean that 31% of recipients on any particular list will actively decide to unsubscribe from a list or report it as spam or otherwise unsubscribe from that list. This is 31% of all email address owners will get a new address and abandon their current one. There are a few reasons for the churn.

Email addresses provided through an employer do not carry to new employers.
Recipients change ISPs.
Recipients change email addresses at ISPs, often to avoid high levels of spam.

Engaging users may help convince them that mail is worth enough to subscribe with their new address. However, senders will still see addresses drop off their lists. The person behind the email address is no longer using that address.

Not all subscription and delivery problems are under the control of the sender. Address abandonment is one of those problems.